Monday, July 19, 2010

Ten books. Only ten. No, this is good. I'm overwhelmed with books and getting down to ten would be good. Maybe if I get down to only ten lists of ten things, I would be in good shape. One of them could be ten ways to find books. There are four to start in the assignment, and a bunch of others on top of that. I wonder if Nancy Pearl has ever appeared on Letterman?

10. Google Books9. WorldCat8. LibraryThing or Goodreads7. Amazon or Barnes&Noble6. Blogs devoted to genres and book reviews5. Professional Committees and their work (such as ALSC's annual notable books for kids)4. Databases like Novelist or About:Books. (You'll need a library card number for these)3. Books or magazines or journals about books2. Recommendations from friends1. Books I've been meaning to read anyhow

Trying out the social sites, I found browsing to be a little cornering because I could only alter or narrow the search one subject term at a time. For instance, Goodreads' Explore->Books let me select "children" but then listed all the results within that. Entering "children's fantasy" and selecting genre had me scrolling past all the Harry Potter, being surprised by the inclusion of Slaughter House Five, and basically ending up with a long list that didn't seem very browseable.

The Zeitgeist tab in LibraryThing showed an array of tag assortments: authors, genres: miscellaneous tags, reviewers, people with the most books, and so on. Starting with these unusual categories gave me chance to happen upon something by sheer popularity, accessing collections or books that have most been selected by others. Without a particular subject in mind this proved to be an interesting approach.

Google Books and Amazon are both places where searching seems yield closer results to what I am intending to find that then either Goodreads or LibraryThing were able to produce, but that is their strength. Goodreads and LT seem to have arranged their site according to users and what they are doing and promoting, rather than the actual books themselves, which seems to be Google Books and Amazon's interest.

The interconnectedness of the sites, being able to find a book on Amazon from Librar Thing, or finding a book in a library on the Google Books page, makes me think that there will be less and less undiscovered information, a visible component of the One Machine.

With all this technology abounding and so nimbly guiding me through the digital world, I feel very capable and able to access a lot of information. But as useful as these systems are, I still feel like they are very contrived, designed to meet my anticipated needs. Where is the whimsy and nonsense? Where is the inexplicable? Where is the coincidence? I decided to make my list concerning those who embrace the wild and unseen quality of things. That's right, I'm talking about wizards:

Saturday, July 10, 2010

It seems that current scholarly research on library architecture is mainly focused on digital libraries. There is certainly good reason for that, but the absence of papers about planning and construction of physical spaces strikes me as odd. I had to modify my search from "library architecture" to include "-digital" to even get results. From this list, not many of the articles were cited more than the requisite five times. A lot of the articles were from a long time ago, the 60s, 70s, and 80s, so they probably would not be as helpful to someone searching for the current trends. By clicking on the link to the articles which cited the ones found in the search, I found a few topically relevant articles but these had not been cited yet by others. Clicking on the related articles link gave more of that type of result. Changing the search terms to phrases like "library construction" and especially "public library design" was the best method for finding current, relevant and cited results.

Compared to the Library Literature database, the Google Scholar results were more spread out in subject, and also in format. Google Scholar pointed me to articles, citations and, distinct from the Kent databases, books. These books actually seemed to be more often cited than articles but are probably not as easily retrieved. Some results were, partially, in Google Books, so there was some immediate access, but since Google Books only shows up twenty percent of published books you only get a glimpse of the item. In terms of format, the Kent database certainly made it easier to collect the results I wanted, just by clicking on the "add to folder" boxes next to the listings. Google Scholar did not have this option.

nih.gov [PDF]A Fry, S Adams - Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 1957 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
S INCE the start of the BULLETIN in 1911 there have been 18 articles and five fairly important
news notes published related to library planning and/or architecture. The news notes,
chronologically, mention the new University of Michigan General Library (1); the second ...Cited by 6 - Related articles - All 5 versions

X Guodong - The Journal of The Library Science In China, 2001 - en.cnki.com.cn
...LibraryArchitecture in China in the 1990s. Xia Guodong. In the 1990s, more and larger new librarybuildings were built in China. In this paper, the author analyzes their characteristics in design
and functions. 1 tab. 8 refs. 【Key Words】： Libraryarchitecture in China. 1990s. ...Cited by 5 - Related articles - Cached

DE Thompson - The Journal of Library History, 1969 - JSTOR
Page 1. A History of LibraryArchitecture: A Bibliographical Essay ... Much has been written about
libraryarchitecture but there is little in print on its history. There are no sources in which a com
plete history of libraryarchitecture, either as a whole or by type of library, is presented. ...Cited by 5 - Related articles

RE Ellsworth - The Library Quarterly, 1955 - JSTOR
Architects, too, now live by a new conception of their work. "Form fol- lows function," now a tiresome
cliche' really did represent a new spirit in architecture in the 1920's and 1930's and today. The
best of the architects did begin in that period to follow the principle that beauty was ...Cited by 5 - Related articles - All 2 versions

W Hai-qing - Journal of Lanzhou College of Petrochemical …, 2002 - en.cnki.com.cn
Combining state conditions with requirement of information age, based on the culture , art ,
flexibility,ecology and multifunction of libraryarchitecture as well as the modern tendency of libraryand infiltration of humanism,the paper discusses the new tendency of college library...Cited by 4 - Related articles - Cached

[CITATION] Carnegie libraries: their history and impact on American public library development

[CITATION] Planning library buildings: A select bibliography

SM Foote - portal: Libraries and the Academy, 2004 - muse.jhu.edu
... These designs still do not address issues that arise when a subset of the patron population wishes
to come together to work collaboratively ... A glance at the New York PublicLibrary Reading Room
in figure 3 will confirm this phenomenon in which readers' turf is vigorously ...Cited by 7 - Related articles - All 3 versions

DE Campbell, TM Shlechter - The Library Quarterly, 1979 - JSTOR
... The third method involved direct observation of all public areas of the library to produce detailed ...in different library locations, and satisfaction with different aspects of the total library system ... It
was concluded that the physical design may influence student behavior and satisfaction ...Cited by 19 - Related articles - All 4 versions

WW Sannwald - 2009 - books.google.com
... Chicago 2009 Page 3. William W. Sannwald was assistant to the city manager and
manager of librarydesign and development from 1997 to 2004, and was city librarian
of the San Diego PublicLibrary from 1979 to 1997. He is ...Cited by 23 - Related articles - Library Search - All 8 versions

CR Brown - 2002 - books.google.com
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this
book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accuracy or relia- bility of the
information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any ...Cited by 13 - Related articles - All 5 versions

A McDonald - Advances in librarianship, 2000 - emeraldinsight.com
At the close of the 20th century new library buildings continue to be con- structed all over the
world with increasingly imaginative and varied designs. This is despite some almost reckless
predictions about the end of libraries and their book collections, due to the rapid growth in ...Cited by 9 - Related articles - BL Direct - All 3 versions

Sunday, July 4, 2010

It was very hard to find articles relating to the physical construction of a library. Cited articles about information architecture abound. Digital libraries building principles are very much being analyzed and written about, but physical spaces do not seem to garner as much attention. I had intended to explore physical spaces, but results relating to digital library architecture were much more prevalent. Even articles that were thorough enough, on topic enough and old enough to be considered relevant information were not cited. For instance:

Just like this last example, plenty of Library Literature articles were not found in the Citation Index. Another problem in dealing with the results was the inability to filter out article written in different languages.

Because I think a large part of this assignment is to compare the results of searching in academic, highly controlled spaces where the ability to 'tag' requires writing a whole paper to more loosely associative situation with Google Scholar, I chose to eschew the minimum citation requirement in creating my bibliography.

As a last note, I would be happy to be wrong about this. If anyone is able to do a search on this topic and find the articles in ISI, please post a comment with your method.